The present disclosure provides a system and method for the detection of rare mutations and copy number variations in cell free polynucleotides. Generally, the systems and methods comprise sample preparation, or the extraction and isolation of cell free polynucleotide sequences from a bodily fluid; subsequent sequencing of cell free polynucleotides by techniques known in the art; and application of bioinformatics tools to detect rare mutations and copy number variations as compared to a reference. The systems and methods also may contain a database or collection of different rare mutations or copy number variation profiles of different diseases, to be used as additional references in aiding detection of rare mutations, copy number variation profiling or general genetic profiling of a disease.
Legal claims defining the scope of protection, as filed with the USPTO.
1. A method for detecting a presence or an absence of cancer in a subject, comprising: (a) converting a plurality of polynucleotides obtained or derived from a sample from the subject into a population of tagged parent polynucleotides, wherein the converting comprises tagging the plurality of polynucleotides with n different molecular barcodes, wherein n is at least 2 and no more than 10,000*z, wherein z is a mean of an expected number of duplicate molecules in the plurality of polynucleotides having identical start and stop positions; (b) amplifying a plurality of the tagged parent polynucleotides to generate amplified polynucleotides; (c) sequencing a plurality of the amplified polynucleotides to generate sequence data; and (d) using the sequence data comprising sequence information from a plurality of sequencing reads of the amplified polynucleotides to detect the presence or the absence of the cancer in the subject.
2. The method of claim 1 , wherein (d) comprises detecting a presence or an absence of an abnormal change in an epigenetic pattern.
3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the sample is a tissue sample or a tumor biopsy sample.
4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the sample is a blood sample.
5. The method of claim 1 , wherein the plurality of polynucleotides comprises cell-free deoxyribonucleic acid (cfDNA) molecules.
6. The method of claim 1 , wherein the plurality of polynucleotides comprises 100 to 300,000 haploid human genome equivalents of polynucleotides.
7. The method of claim 1 , wherein the converting is performed using blunt-end ligation, sticky-end ligation, molecular inversion probes, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), ligation-based PCR, single-strand ligation, or single-strand circularization.
8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the n different molecular barcodes have a length of between 5 and 20 nucleotides.
9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the n different molecular barcodes is no more than 1,000*z.
10. The method of claim 1 , wherein the n different molecular barcodes is no more than 100*z.
11. The method of claim 1 , further comprising enriching a plurality of the amplified polynucleotides for target genomic regions of interest prior to the sequencing.
12. The method of claim 1 , wherein (d) further comprises mapping a plurality of the sequencing reads to a reference sequence.
13. The method of claim 12 , wherein (d) further comprises identifying unique polynucleotides of the sample from a plurality of the sequencing reads using at least the sequence information from the molecular barcodes.
14. The method of claim 13 , further comprising detecting a presence or an absence of a somatic genetic variant from among the sequence data of the unique polynucleotides.
15. The method of claim 14 , wherein the somatic genetic variant comprises a single nucleotide variation (SNV), an insertion or deletion (indel), a copy number variation (CNV), or a gene fusion.
16. The method of claim 15 , further comprising detecting the presence or the absence of the cancer in the subject based at least in part on the detected presence of the one or more somatic genetic variants.
17. The method of claim 2 , further comprising detecting a presence or an absence of a somatic genetic variant.
18. The method of claim 13 , wherein a plurality of the unique polynucleotides of the sample are determined by grouping a plurality of the sequencing reads into families based at least on the sequence information from the molecular barcodes and start and stop base positions of the sequencing reads that map to the reference sequence.
19. The method of claim 18 , further comprising, at each locus of a plurality of loci of the reference sequence, determining a base call at a locus based on the sequencing reads in each family from among a plurality of the families.
20. The method of claim 19 , further comprising assigning a confidence score to the base calls.
21. The method of claim 20 , further comprising determining a frequency of one or more bases called at the locus from among a plurality of the families based at least on the confidence scores.
22. The method of claim 21 , further comprising detecting a presence or an absence of a somatic genetic variant based at least on the frequency of the one or more bases called at each locus.
23. The method of claim 1 , wherein a treatment for cancer was administered to the subject prior to (a).
24. The method of claim 23 , wherein the treatment for cancer comprises a chemotherapy, a radiation therapy, or a combination therapy.
25. The method of claim 24 , further comprising identifying, based on the sequence data of the sample, a different cancer treatment for the subject than the treatment for cancer that was administered to the subject prior to (a).
26. The method of claim 1 , wherein a subset of polynucleotides of the plurality of polynucleotides have a size length of between 140 and 160 base pairs.
27. A method for detecting a presence or an absence of cancer in a subject, comprising: (a) converting a plurality of cell-free deoxyribonucleic acid (cfDNA) molecules obtained or derived from a sample from the subject into a population of tagged parent polynucleotides, wherein the converting comprises tagging the plurality of cfDNA molecules with n different molecular barcodes, wherein n is at least 2 and no more than 10,000*z, wherein z is a mean of an expected number of duplicate molecules in the plurality of cfDNA molecules having identical start and stop positions, wherein the plurality of cfDNA molecules comprises 100 to 100,000 haploid human genome equivalents of cfDNA molecules; (b) amplifying a plurality of the tagged parent polynucleotides to generate amplified polynucleotides; (c) sequencing a plurality of the amplified polynucleotides to generate sequence data; and (d) using the sequence data comprising sequence information from a plurality of sequencing reads of the amplified polynucleotides to detect the presence or the absence of the cancer in the subject.
28. The method of claim 27 , wherein (d) comprises detecting a presence or an absence of a somatic genetic variant or an abnormal change in an epigenetic pattern.
29. The method of claim 27 , wherein the n different molecular barcodes is no more than 1,000*z.
30. The method of claim 27 , wherein the n different molecular barcodes is no more than 100*z, wherein the molecular barcodes have a length of between 5 and 20 nucleotides.
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January 19, 2021
May 11, 2021
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